NAEA Critical Encounters

Critical Encounters: Human|Nature

Critical Encounters: Human|Nature will examine the relationships and tensions between humankind and the natural world and will consider how factors such as the culture, wealth, geography, and history of societies have influenced humanity’s stewardship, exploitation, understanding, and artistic representations of the natural environment. It will investigate how past actions have resulted in local and global environmental crises and weigh potential solutions. Human|Nature will survey how societies either chooses to collectively protect their shared resources or retreat from cooperation and the impact these decisions have had on humanity and human rights. Human|Nature will also gauge the impact of the natural world on human development by considering how nature has shaped the shared human experience as well as exploring the degree to which individual values, qualities, and desires are either naturally imbued or socially nurtured.

As part of this process the Columbia College Student Chapter of the NAEA/IAEA will host on our website, as a resource base for art teachers, a collection of art lesson plans that teach students through the arts about our environment, recycling, nature and human rights. We hope to make this website a resource of lesson plans related to the theme of Human|Nature for art teachers around the country to use in their classrooms.

Please send us a digital copy of any lesson plan that you have created that would be related to the Human|Nature theme.

Send the digital version of your lesson plans to:

NationalArtsEducatorAssociation@loop.colum.edu